Inkdeath (Inkworld #3)

Yes, yes! Farid wanted to put his hands over his ears. Orpheus was right. They’d tried everything, but the White Women simply didn’t appear to them, and who else was to tell Orpheus how to bring Dustfinger back from the dead?

Without a word, Farid pulled his shovel out of the ground and began digging again.

He had blisters on his hands by the time he finally struck wood. The chest he pulled out of the ground wasn’t very large, but like the last one it was filled to the brim with silver coins. Farid had been listening when Orpheus read it there: Under the gallows on the Dark Hill, long before the Prince of Sighs had the oaks there felled for his son’s coffin, a band of highwaymen had buried a casket of silver in the ground. Then they killed each other in a quarrel, but the silver still lay there in the earth, with their bones bleaching above it.

The wood of the chest was rotten, and as with the other treasures he had dug up, Farid wondered whether the silver might not have been lying under the gallows even before Orpheus wrote his words. If asked such questions Cheeseface would only smile knowingly, but Farid doubted whether he really knew the answer.

"There you are! Now who’s talking? That ought to last another month." Orpheus’s smile was so self-satisfied that Farid would have liked to wipe it off his face with a shovelful of dirt. Another month! The silver he and the Chunk were putting into leather bags would have filled the hungry bellies of everyone in Ombra for months to come.

"How much longer is this going to take? The hangman’s probably already on his way with fresh gallows fodder." When Orpheus was nervous his voice sounded less impressive.

Without a word Farid tied up another bag full to bursting, kicked the empty chest back into the pit, and gave the hanged men one last glance. There had been a gallows on the Dark Hill before, but it was the Milksop who had declared it the main place of execution again. The stink of corpses drifted up to the castle too often from the gallows outside the city gate, and the stench didn’t go well with the fine dishes that the Adderhead’s brother-in-law ate while Ombra went hungry.

"Have you found me some minstrels for this afternoon?"

Farid just nodded as he followed Orpheus, carrying the heavy bags.

"The one you got me yesterday was ugly as sin!" Orpheus got Oss to help him up onto his horse. "Like a scarecrow come to life! And most of what came out of his toothless mouth was the usual old stuff: beautiful princess loves poor strolling player, tralalala, handsome prince’s son falls in love with peasant’s daughter, tralalalee. . .

not a word about the White Women for me to use."

Farid was only half listening. He didn’t think much of the strolling players anymore.

Most of them sang and danced for the Milksop these days, and they had voted the Black Prince out of his position as their king because he was openly hostile to the occupying army.

"All the same," Orpheus went on, "the scarecrow did know a couple of new songs about the Bluejay. It cost me a pretty penny to worm them out of him, and he sang them as quietly as if the Milksop in person were standing under my window, but one of them I’d really never heard before. Are you still sure Fenoglio isn’t writing again?"

"Perfectly sure." Farid slung his rucksack on his back and whistled softly through his teeth, as Dustfinger always used to. Jink shot out from under the gallows with a dead mouse in his jaws. Only the younger marten had stayed with Farid. Gwin was with Roxane, Dustfinger’s wife — as if he wanted to be where his master was most likely to go if Death’s pale fingers really did give him up.

"Just why are you so sure?" Orpheus twisted his mouth in distaste as Jink jumped up on Farid’s shoulder and disappeared inside the rucksack. Cheeseface disliked the marten, but tolerated him, presumably because he had once belonged to Dustfinger.

"Rosenquartz says he isn’t writing anymore, and as Fenoglio’s glass man he should know, right?"

In fact, Rosenquartz was always complaining of his hard life now that Fenoglio was back in Minerva’s attic room, and Farid himself cursed the steep wooden staircase every time Orpheus sent him to question Fenoglio about things that Orpheus couldn’t find in his original book. What lands lay south of the sea bordering Argenta? Is the prince who rules northern Lombrica related to the Adderhead’s wife? Where exactly do the giants live, or have they died out now? Do the predatory fish in the rivers eat river-nymphs?

Sometimes Fenoglio wouldn’t even let Farid in after he’d toiled up all those stairs, but now and then he would have drunk so much that he was in a talkative mood. On those days the old man overwhelmed him with such a torrent of information that Farid’s head was spinning by the time he came back to Orpheus — who then questioned him all over again. It was enough to drive you crazy. But every time Orpheus and Fenoglio tried communicating with each other directly they started to quarrel within a few minutes.

"Good. Excellent! It would complicate matters if the old man took to liking words better than wine again! His last notions led to nothing but hopeless confusion Orpheus picked up the reins and looked at the sky. It was going to be another rainy day, gray and dismal as the faces of the people of Ombra. "Masked robbers, books of immortality, a prince returning from the dead!" Shaking his head, he rode his horse toward the path to Ombra. "Who knows what he’d have thought up next! Better for Fenoglio to drink away what few wits he has left. I’ll see to his story myself After all, I understand it a great deal better than he does."

Farid had stopped listening as he dragged his donkey out of the bushes. Let Cheeseface talk away. Farid didn’t care who wrote the words to bring Dustfinger back, just so long as he did come back in the end! Even if the whole wretched story went to hell in the process.

As usual, the donkey tried to bite Farid when he swung himself up onto its bony back. Cheeseface was riding one of the finest horses in Ombra. Despite his pudgy figure, he was a good horseman but, of course, miserly as he was, he’d bought only a donkey for Farid, a vicious animal so old that its head was bald. Even two donkeys couldn’t have carried the Chunk, so Oss trotted along beside Orpheus like an overgrown dog, his face sweating with the effort of running up and down the narrow paths through the hills around Ombra.

"Good. So Fenoglio isn’t writing anymore." Orpheus liked to think out loud. It sometimes seemed as if he couldn’t put his ideas in order unless he heard his own voice at the same time. "But where do all the stories about the Bluejay come from, then? The widows he protects, silver left on poor folk’s doorsteps, poached meat on the plates of fatherless children. . . Is all that really Mo’s own doing, or did Fenoglio write a few words by way of giving him a helping hand?"

A cart came toward them. Cursing, Orpheus turned his horse toward the thorny bushes, and the Chunk stared up with a silly grin at the two boys kneeling in the cart, hands tied behind their backs, faces pinched with fear. One of them had eyes even brighter than Meggie’s, and neither was older than Farid. Of course not. If they’d been older they would have gone with Cosimo on the disastrous expedition against the Adderhead that got all the men killed, and they’d be dead by now, too. But presumably that was no comfort to them this morning. Their bodies would be visible from Ombra, a dreadful example to all who were tempted by hunger to go poaching.